Fitness and Recovery Trackers: Apple Watch vs. Oura Ring vs. Whoop
Fitness, recovery, and health tracking technology is becoming more advanced every year. Devices are packing more sensors than ever before, and software is becoming better at analyzing the data gathered by devices. Consumers have several choice when looking for trackers.
Pantheon founder, Erik Pavia, reviews three of the most popular trackers on the market — the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, and Whoop — to help you decide which fitness and health tracker is best for monitoring your activity, recovery, and health metrics.
Which should you get?
If you want a multifunctional fitness and health tracker:
The Apple Watch is impossible to beat. The Apple Watch is a multi-use fitness companion. It plays music, functions as a GPS, and runs countless fitness apps. The Apple Watch also collects useful health information like blood oxygen, heart rhythm, and fall detection.
If you want something focused on sleep and recovery:
The Oura Ring is the best option for one key reason: it includes a body-temperature sensor. Not only will the Oura tell you how well you’re sleeping with a motion sensor and heart rate sensor, it will tell you trends in your body temperature. This is incredible in the age of pandemics. You can see if your body temperature is increasing day-over-day, even if you’re not showing symptoms, and prioritize recovery immediately.
If you want an all-in-one device for tracking exercise and recovery:
The Whoop tackles both. The Whoop is focused on athletic performance, which means collecting as much information about you as possible. The Whoop hardware only has 2 sensors, motion and heart rate, so it gathers data through frequent, user-submitted surveys on your behaviors. It will ask questions about inputs like exercise quality, alcohol consumption, and food timing. The Whoop then analyzes the data you provide to give insights on how various factors affect your performance.
If you want the best experience overall:
Getting the Apple Watch and Oura together will provide unmatched utility, fitness tracking, health tracking, and recovery tracking. You need to buy 2 expensive devices, but the price of both is actually comparable to the price of the Whoop alone.
A Whoop subscription costs $30 per month. Over a 2 year period, it would run $720, (although there are discounts if you commit to a longer contract)
The newest, premium Apple Watch Series 6 with all available sensors (motion, heart rate, blood oxygen, electrocardiogram, altimeter, GPS) is $400.
The Oura Ring is $300.
With the Apple Watch and Oura together, you get information on vital health information that you cannot get in any other wearable devices. If you hold on to each for at least 2 years, the combo costs the same as a Whoop.
Pros and Cons of Each Device
Apple Watch Pros
The Apple Watch has a ton of functionality, which means it works as a standalone fitness companion. You can load it with music, connect headphones to it, and use any one of a myriad of apps to track your workouts. You don’t need to carry a phone with you when you workout. It’s a game changer for running especially if you want a lightweight experience without sacrificing GPS, tracking, and music. You can learn more in our Apple Watch review.
The Apple Watch is packed with sensors, incluing motion, heart rate, blood oxygen, electrocardiogram, altimeter, GPS. The Apple Watch will monitor more vitals than any other device.
Aside from the fitness and health features, the Apple Watch is a small computer platform. The App Store is growing with Apple Watch apps for anything: weather, photography, diet, communication, productivity, and anything else developers think of. There’s an Apple Watch app for that.
Oura Ring Pros
The Oura Ring’s body temperature sensor is unique to the Oura Ring and is a total game changer. This extra data point will tell you much more about your recovery than heart rate and heart rate variability can.
The Oura Ring looks great. It doesn't look like a fitness tracker. It looks like a cool piece of jewelry.
The Oura app visualizations are useful and easy to understand. Sleep and Recovery scores on the Oura app are a simple abstraction for people who don’t want to get into the details, but you can also get detailed graphs on your metrics that are presented in a way that’s useful.
Wearing the Oura to sleep is not as cumbersome as wearing something on your wrist. Check out our sleep tracker comparison between the Apple Watch and the Oura Ring.
Whoop Pros
The Whoop is an all-in-one device for sleep and recovery. There’s no need to use multiple devices.
The Whoop does incredibly deep analytics if you manually answer the survey questions in the the app. Data entry is as quick as it can be for the types of detailed questions Whoop asks. The Whoop provides insights for daily, weekly, monthly, and annual intervals, so you can see how you’re trending over time.
The Whoop has a cool factor. The brand is cool with fitness buffs. The device itself looks cool. The minimal band doesn't look goofy the way other fitness trackers do. Whoop has also started building cool app functions for sharing your workouts to social media.
Apple Watch Cons
The Apple Watch is too simple (or consumer friendly?) in the way it displays information. The graphs in Apple Health are simple to the point of being useless. While the Apple Watch collects a lot of data, it doesn’t return valuable insights. There are third-party apps that run more robust analytics than Apple does, but the native experience isn’t for people who want deep insights.
The Apple Watch is deeply tied to the Apple ecosystem. If works best if you use Apple’s other products and services, like Apple Music and iMessage. Also, it needs an iPhone to work, so if you don’t use an iPhone, this is not an option for you.
Oura Ring Cons
The Oura Ring does not track exercise. It will get damaged if you try to lift weights with it. It will read activity and exercise from Apple Health and Google Fit and analyze it with recovery, but it doesn’t track activity itself.
You have to get it sized correctly for it to properly work.
Whoop Cons
The Whoop only has two sensors, motion and heart rate. To get deep analytics, you need to manually enter a lot of information. If you’re dedicated to learning about yourself, the work might be worth it. But if you don’t want to do all the manual entry, or if you just want to know the basics on your sleep and exercise, there’s not much value in the Whoop over other trackers.
The Whoop is expensive. You do not buy a Whoop band itself: the Whoop is a subscription service. It costs $30/month. If you buy a year in advance, the price drops to $24/month. If you stop paying the subscription, the Whoop band is useless.
The Whoop is mostly a closed ecosystem. Whoop does not connect to Apple Health or Google Fit, so if you care about portability or keeping one repository of all your health information, this may be a problem. Because it doesn’t connect to Android or Apple’s health systems, there is no compatibility with most third-party apps like Nike Run Club, Pelaton, Calm, and Headspace. Whoop has integrations with Strava and Training Peaks, specifically, but they don’t have an open API that all developers can build connections into.
The device you get is a personal choice. If any of one them helps you improve your health, its a great choice.